AUGUST 2019

Business Tips:

15 Invaluable Laws of Growth

Our management is doing a new study on the John Maxwell curriculum with the book called the 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth. We recommend you pick up a copy or listen to it online if you have the technology to do so. We will be exploring these laws as a team this year.

              The goal in the study is to help each of us learn how to grow and develop ourselves so we have the best chance of becoming the person we were created to be.

~ The Law of Reflection, Ladder, and Rubber Band ~

              Reflection: Learning to pause allows growth to catch up to you. Questions to ask: What did you love and what did you learn? Don’t let the experiences and people that you meet pass you without reflection. Each day should include a time out to stop. Experience is not the best teacher. Evaluated experience is the best teacher. If this wasn’t true, all older people would have more results. Here are quick questions to reflect: What did I learn today, how can I apply what I learned today, and how can I pass on what I learned today?

              Ladder: Character growth determines the height of personal growth. Competency is what I can do as a leader and character is who I am as a leader. Both are mutually important. Commit that you will be better on the inside than you are on the outside. – Character matters. The inside influences the outside. Our inside development is in our control. Inside victories should precede outside ones. Before I can do…..I must be. In the end, the choice you make, makes you.

              Rubber band – Growth stops when you lose the tension between where you are to where you can be. Life begins as the end of our comfort zone. An unstretched rubber band is useless, like us, unstretched – we will be ineffective. The comfort zone is characterized by doing the same things in the same ways with the same people as the same time and getting the same results….then asking the same question…..WHY? Advantages: You learn things faster when you stretch, you have a broader range of experiences, you bump into obstacles sooner, and you get around the obstacles sooner. Stretch in abilities and giftedness.

Personal Tips:

~ Resolution 9: ~

RESOLVE TO DEVELOP THE ART & SCIENCE OF LEADERSHIP:

The highest level of leadership is achieved by only a few individuals in any field, and it only happens when a great leader inspires other performers to become leaders themselves. It’s tough enough to perform, let alone to perform while leading others to step up their game; but championship teams are created when leaders surround themselves with other leaders, raising the bar of excellence throughout their organization.

Business, Scoreboards, and Game Plans - Business leaders, then, must constantly examine the horizon, ensuring that the current game, when executed properly, still satisfies the customers. Every savvy business leader must break his business before his competitors do. Remember, the only constant in the game of business is satisfied customers; the only way to achieve this is through constant and never-ending improvement both in the rules and in the game plan.

Business as a game - Remember Collins’s hedgehog concept? Another way of thinking about the game is to define the game plan through a company’s hedgehog. By clearly defining and then updating the three circles as conditions change to determine the intersection point of passion (What are we passionate about?), potential (What can we be the best at?), and profits (What drives our economic engine?), the game plan is built around the hedgehog concept in order to win. To define the game, a leader must decide which criteria are essential to satisfy the customers. Then, he turns the criteria into a game, helping everyone buy into winning the game to satisfy the customers. After this, it’s time to reward the leaders and the team who execute the plays effectively.

Aligning a culture - Organizational theorist Edgar Schein has defined culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems that has worked well enough to be considered valid and is passed on to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.” The thirteen resolutions are basic assumptions about life that, when learned, help solve problems personally and professionally. They can be taught in communities, which create a culture around the thirteen resolutions. Emerson’s statement, “Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization,” conveys the same message.

Inspecting and Expecting - For leaders to create a leadership culture, they must create a culture of expecting and inspecting results. Great leadership, then, is less about how effective a person is at accomplishing tasks—although leaders are very effective in their tasks—and more about who a leader is and the culture he creates. Leaders create culture; culture creates results. The results are good or bad, depending on whether the culture aligns with the game plan to produce the desired results. A culture of execution demands excellence from each individual, compelling others to raise their game, not by force, but by the positive peer pressure of a unifying vision backed by the trust in the leaders.

Attracting and Developing Leaders - If a person expects to win in business, he must find and influence talented, disciplined people who will buy into the cultural current being created. They must be willing to learn the thirteen resolutions, applying them to life, and study the scoreboard in each area, while hating to lose badly enough to change when necessary. No coach, not even the best ones, can win without talent, but the bad ones seem to lose even with talent. A leader must surround himself with the right people, or he is doomed to mediocrity.

Trilateral Leadership Ledger (TLL) and Sturgeons Law -  The TLL reveals how one can grow as a leader by stating that leaders must be effective and advance into the elite 10 percent in the three key attributes—character, task, and relationships. Check out the book for more detail on this measurement tool.  Theodore Sturgeon, a science fiction writer, knew perfection would never be reached. In fact, he refuted many of the critics of the science fiction genre at the 1953 World Science Fiction Convention when he said: That 90% of science fiction was junk. However, this idea became law when applied to all other things concerning what is valuable. 10% is really what is valuable. 90% of everything is junk. It applies to things in life and in business.

Woodward, Orrin. RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE. Kindle Edition.

Life Skills:

Faith, Family, Fitness, Finances, Friends, Fun, Following, Freedom; we call these the 8F’s in life.

Many of these categories can tell one where their priorities are in life by measuring the time one would spend in one of the above categories. I know we don’t have it all figured out, but we have a lot of great sources that speak into these items and we welcome your comments. Please feel free to drop us a line concerning any of them.

THE DAILY DOZEN - READ

This year we are going to use this concept to explain 1 word per month that if made into a habit, we believe your life will, no doubt, improve.

Read to grow at least 30 min every day or more!

Notable quotes: They are italicized above.

Something I want you to know:

Reflect, stretch, and develop yourself as a leader in life – It’s worth it!